Strange Masculinity: Read five original short stories by Fitzcarraldo Edition authors, published in collaboration with the press for Another Man's Winter/Spring 2026 issue.
The sticker on the back of the NO PARKING sign on Sunset Blvd. read, “only u can open hidden doors.” I wanted to murder whoever had written it by taking a knife to their throat and pressing it tautly against the grease of their skin. It was boiling, an electric 33ºC, the sky so overblown it vibrated like one elongated camera flash. Gravity pulled distinct droplets of sweat down my spine into a vivid line, making me hesitant to move in case a negative of it transferred to my white blouse. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so uncomfortable in a professional scenario, but as my father used to say, “Shut up and get on with it.”
I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Gaucho Grill with The Magician waiting for a table. We were told it would be 20 minutes at least, so I slumped against the NO PARKING sign, its thin blade of shadow falling between us, the only shade for miles. He stood maybe around a meter tall, his stout frame enclosed in, of all things, a dark herringbone suit. Inexplicably, I felt we formed a mismatched set of salt and pepper shakers.
The Magician was world famous for his sleight of hand work. On YouTube I watched him chuck an Ace of Diamonds clean through a pencil, slicing off its eraser half. In another clip, he sat blindfolded at a table with a dagger in hand and a deck of cards spread haphazardly before him. He then proceeded to successfully stab the cards people shouted out from the audience. One could do worse in terms of subjects to profile, though the circumstances surrounding this lunch were eroding the chance for it to be any good. Everything was off, not just the temperature, the trajectory going awry somewhere during the morning when The Magician reportedly stormed off set while shooting a documentary, a documentary which was about him. There had been an argument with the director, resulting in raised voices and red faces, but no one was keen to get into the details with me.
Shortly after the tantrum, I picked him up and drove, silently, to the restaurant of his choosing, an anglicized Argentinian steakhouse chain crammed full of people (hard surfaces and an aroma of charcoal). Despite the multitudes of calm, Eden-like bistros populating the culinary landscape of Los Angeles, The Magician had managed to select, against all odds, exactly none of them. Had I more nerve, I would have suggested somewhere else, but it seemed like The Magician was in possession of a delicate constitution, and I knew no good would come of unnecessarily agitating it. At least, this would be the advice of my editor, a 65-year-old woman who beat lung cancer twice and still smoked, albeit a vape. She would not want me to add any “threatening forces” to the situation, and in fact had educated me to be silent and wide-eyed for profiles, a blank interface to receive information both real and affected. The absence of my personality was meant to incite a divulgence, “Carla, people hate voids. They will do absolutely anything to escape them – especially confess.” It was, one might say, an act of deception.
The heat created a time delay in my thoughts because they kept melting away. The minutes trickled by, but I was unable to do anything with them. The sun burned every iota of whimsy out of my system. Small talk was out of the question, except it would have been useful to gently palpate for anecdotes. It would have been useful to determine if I was dealing with a stick of dynamite, an artist, or a quack, except my mind was on my phone, and the psychic weight of messages piling up from various aspects of my personal life. What little focus I had tripped along and into those aspects, some more cavernous and bleak than others.
Dimly, I became aware of a sort of rhythmic tick on the back of my wrist, a Morse code message summoning me back to reality. With the knuckle of his index finger, The Magician was tapping on my watch, a Tissot Seastar Quartz from 1975 that belonged to my father. It was angular and masculine, and essentially colonized my forearm, but it was my favorite thing despite the fact that it no longer worked.
“It’s stopped. I know.”
“Time is a peculiar thing. It has a habit of freezing.”
At this, I looked into his face in a way I had been reserving for when we were sitting across from each other. It resisted being disassembled and contained what I can only explain as an amalgam of visages of wizards and magicians from across pop culture. A trick of the light?
An optical illusion caused by the haze of car exhaust? If forced to describe him, “owl-like” was the best I could do; his heavyset brow and age suggested something both avian and wise.
“It was my dad’s.”
“Oh,” he paused as if his thought snapped in half, “Passed?”
“Passing. In the process of.”
The words slid out of me, a malfunction of tongue and brain due to distraction and discomfort. I stared down at my shoes, at the glittering mica in the concrete, and immediately changed the subject in hopes of recovering any semblance of professional ground.
“What happened on set today?”
“In 1902, Vienna-born and Brooklyn-raised magician Max Malini approaches Senator Mark Hanna in a corridor of our Nation’s Capital and proceeds to remove, via the use of his teeth, a button from the Senator’s blazer. The button held prominently in Malini’s grin for all to see is then, through miraculous means, restored to its place of origin without a needle, thread, or any apparent device.
Bowled over by such a peculiar act, the Senator invites Malini to perform for President Roosevelt at the White House the very next day.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it.
“In 1912, a crowd of spectators gathered around Malini in the San Francisco Hall of Justice. The spectators consisted of one judge, the Chief of Police, the Board of Police Commissioners, and several detectives. In his heavily exaggerated Eastern European accent, Malini asks who is interested in getting rich quick. Quiet chuckles ensue. He takes a $10 bill, gives it to a detective, and encourages him to make a fist around it. “See, it is a cinch. You get money, you keep money.” The crowd now openly laughs, and Malini signals to the detective, through a nod of the chin, to open his fist, only the money is now gone, replaced by a bit of newsprint. ‘Not to worry,’ Malini goes, ‘You need only to buy a lemon from the fruit stand on Kearny for a nickel, and here you go.’ From the detective’s pocket Malini pulls out a lemon, and from another pocket pulls out a knife, then slices the lemon in half to reveal the missing $10 bill.”
The Magician then unfolded a persimmon-colored handkerchief from his own pocket and gently dabbed his forehead, “The magic of these tricks is built on spontaneity and circumstance. They are of the moment and revolve around the ingredients of the setting. Performing magic like this for the camera is antithetical. The act becomes meaningless. There’s no reality for the magic to erupt out of, and it needs to erupt like a severe, naturally occurring phenomenon. A volcano!” A hostess violently burst through the door, rattling its glass panels. Like a truck driver, she indiscriminately blared my name into the street. I lifted my chin to the sky. God help me.
We filtered in behind her and the immediate cacophony of metal and porcelain and gregarious laughter from team building lunches slammed into my bones. Every table was occupied apart from ours, a two-top resigned to a corner up against not one, but two glass walls – neither of which had blinds or shades. Absent from this scene was the arctic blast of the air conditioning I had been longing for. The small flicker of confidence I was nurturing sputtered out. I thought of texting my editor to say she should get another person for the story, another man, but I instead stood at the table like an idiot, frozen, until with a delicate sweep of his hand, as if moving it through a cloud, The Magician pulled out a chair and indicated I should sit down. His few movements were not performative or ostentatious in any way and were executed with the exact amount of force needed produce them – no more, no less. The effect, oddly, was one of harmony, such that a hush fell over us.
We began to arrange ourselves, adjusting the placement of water, glasses and spoons.
“The director wanted me to perform a Malini trick, one he used to perform at the end of long, high society dinners hosted by the Vanderbilts, or the Astors, or some such family of New York’s upper echelons. After hours of ingesting and imbibing, when guests are at their softest and most amenable, debating another drink or venturing home, Malini stirs and asks to borrow a woman’s hat and a coin. On the banquet table he spins the coin, covers it with the hat and says, ‘Lady or eagle?’ instead of heads or tails. On receiving ‘eagle’ Malini lifts the hat and the party sees that the coin has fallen in accordance with the prediction.”
The sun had moved directly above The Magician’s head, its rays slicing into my line of sight. “Is the sun too intense?” he said, as if reading my mind.
“I’ll manage.”
He gave a tiny, conspiratorial smile, and then raised the comically oversized menu like an elevator in front of his face, creating a blockade. “Malini spins the coin, once, twice, building expectation, but on the third time, the coin is gone and replaced by an enormous block of ice.”
As the image of this Gilded Age scene formed in my mind, The Magician flung his menu into the glass wall behind him, the white streak of it tearing through my visual field. Instinctively, I flinched and then, somehow, caught The Magician’s eye. He looked down, so I looked down. The space between us on the table was suddenly occupied by a one-foot block of ice. A gasp welled up in me and broke in my throat. I tried to speak around the shards of it, but nothing made it out. So, he spoke, “It’s my job to deceive you.”
A rush of blood to my cheeks, “Mine too. In a way.” I ducked below the table, searching for a puddle of water.
Not a drop there, or under his chair or even anywhere on the table. In fact, it was only in that second, beginning to perspire, placed in the direct path of the sun.
I gingerly inched a finger toward the ice, and The Magician, mainly through a few gestures, encouraged me to pick it up, saying only, “Why don’t you stand? You’ll need both arms.”
I stood up and reached out, and that’s when I noticed my watch was gone. It was inside the ice, at the center of the block. I sat back down, and The Magician leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, and unfurled his napkin across his lap in the manner of a gentleman on holiday by the sea.
“Time and its habit of freezing, remember?”
This story is taken from the Winter/Spring 2026 issue of Another Man, which is on sale now. Order here.
